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| yup...I dunno either |
Last week I dragged myself to yet another midnight premiere on a night when I had to work at five am. Why? Because I have awaited for the release of Cloud Atlas for months, even though everyone I know that has read the book advised me not to see it. Ironically, after watching the movie, I must admit I have absolutely no desire to read the book. This isn't because the movie was bad, quite the contrary, but rather that I simply cannot even picture how the book would work.. Nonetheless, I sat down in the movie theatre, with my rather annoyed friends (I had neglected to tell them they were seeing a nearly three hour film) and waited with baited breath as the film began.
I have held off on writing this review not because I had a laptop stolen (which is a different story altogether) but rather because I had no idea how to even describe what this film is about. I could give you the stock description about a story of hope, love and destiny connecting different people through time, but to do so would be like presenting you with a speck of sand if you asked me to show you the beach. So I will instead go through my general experience of the film, without really talking about any possibly horrible spoilers, because the film works as just that- an experience.
The first half hour or so was extraordinarily difficult. The watcher is presented a bunch of different characters and a bunch of different time periods all seemingly completely separate and yet connected, as though someone had painted several completely different pictures on one giant piece of canvass and then blurred paint from each onto another. This is achieved because most of the scenarios or characters seem to have some sort of narrator to help tell the story that often keeps talking into a shot of a completely different scenario. For example: an aspiring composer's letters to a loved one, a woman in a criminal interview, a post - apocalyptic tribal man telling a story by a fire...the list goes on and on.
And then all of a sudden, after the first half hour, I relaxed, and within the theatre you could tell the audience had begun to enjoy themselves. What is important to understand about this film, is that there are basically seven to ten actors that play all the major character in it. This of course invites the actors to talk with differing accents and weird variations on English (with no subtitles!) , wear different noses or even be of a different race. Thus, the movie becomes a game of Where's Waldo, its finding actors like Hugh Grant, Tom Hanks and Halle Berry excelling in roles that you never even thought imaginable for them to play. This game, coupled with the fantastic visual worlds created for many of the vignettes, meant everyone in the theatre stopped trying to understand the movie; they just enjoyed the experience.
All of a sudden there was euphoric laughter at stealer-of-the-show Jim Broadbent's adventures in one of the vignettes as an old, foolish man conned into living in a nursing home by his brother, and gasps at a matrix-like revelation for a fast-food worker. It was like the directors had found a way for the audience to experience every kind of emotion one can feel while watching a film, while never explaining what the point of it all was some twisted ode to that famous MGM motto Ars Gratis Artis (the line meaning "Art for Art's Sake" that appears with the roaring lion). And that for me is what I took away from this movie, besides some insistent memories of my high school theology teacher talking about the moksha and possible reincarnation of souls in the Hindu tradition.
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| The West Wing: Inspiring people to be political operatives since 1999 |
People watch movies as a way to look at themselves. Rocky is the underdog champion in all of us, just as basically every disney hero or heroine ever is the part of us dreaming for "something more...". We love seeing ourselves and our lives on screen- that's what makes movies so compelling, and that's why half the aspiring politicos in this country want to be in their chosen profession because of The West Wing (only the seasons where Sorkin is involved mind you). To step off my passionate soap-box, Cloud Atlas is perhaps one of the greatest and yet worst movies I've ever seen, because its an experience of life's joys, horrors and fantasies over milennia, and I just don't get it.
